County tour finds growing concerns all over

From shellfish to zucchini, from destructive insects to hazardous waste, from local food to beautiful beaches, it was time to board the bus behind Superior Court Aug.

Ellen Chahey

BUY FRESH, BUY LOCAL – That’s the advice of county extension nutritionist Sue Bourque. She and colleague Kim Concra have put together resources, including a cookbook, to help Cape Codders make the most of fresh local food.

Extension service bus visits Dennis, Chatham and Harwich

From shellfish to zucchini, from destructive insects to hazardous waste, from local food to beautiful beaches, it was time to board the bus behind Superior Court Aug. 8 and take the annual tour offered by the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension hosted by the extension’s director, Bill Clark.

Clark has been leading these tours for years now. They are meant to give county officials and media a look at what the Extension does all over Cape Cod. In recent years, members of the League of Women Voters also go on the ride.

Each year Clark chooses a different area of the Cape as his focus. He has arranged tours to the Upper Cape, the Cape’s tip, and everywhere in between. Lunch is part of the package, and has been served at Coonamessett Farm in Falmouth, Cromwell Court in Hyannis, various community centers, and under the trees at the county farm in Barnstable Village. Sometimes hosts offer snacks, once, memorably, of freshly shucked littlenecks

This year’s trip included sites in Dennis, Harwich, and Chatham. About 15 people joined Clark for the tour.

This year’s bus driver had an especially interesting story to tell the early arrivals. He grew up as the only hearing member of a deaf family. Mother, father, and siblings all spoke only sign language. “I was 28 years old before I learned how to speak English,” he said. But even though his mother can’t hear music and now uses a wheelchair, she loves to dance and happily goes out onto the floor as he pushes her in time to the rhythms.

The first stop was the Aquaculture Research Corporation (ARC) in Dennis. “It’s extremely important to the Cape’s economy,” Clark said on the bus, because “out of 235 shellfish farms on the Cape, 90 percent get their seed from ARC.” The plant, whose infrastructure is in terrible shape (leaking roofs, rusty old fans, boards to help people cross over puddles on the floor) was originally designed as a processing plant, not a hatchery.

ARC would like to sell its property, which includes nearly 40 acres of beautiful shoreland, to the county. The wild territory is “alive with birds,” Clark said. From one window, herons were visible on the marsh.

The county is interested, according to Clark. Not only does ARC provide shellfish seed that supplies many Cape Codders with a livelihood, but they directly employ 18 people and they do wholesale business only with Boston and other off-Cape restaurants so as not to compete with Cape shellfishers and their customers.

One way the business would like to reduce its costs is to build a wind turbine to generate electricity and possibly sell back some energy to the grid, but many neighbors don’t like the idea. The bus, on its way to ARC, passed a neighborhood where some people displayed anti-turbine signs. One woman came out to the curb and yelled something at the bus; her sign said, “Make shellfish, not electricity.”

Elsewhere in Dennis, Steve Spear grows blueberries and he invites people to his farm to come and pick them. But right now, there’s a “Closed – Ripening” sign. Not only berries are ripening. So are some invasive insects that can ruin the blueberry crop.

Spear is working with an old friend – county entomologist Larry Dapsis – to figure out a way to deal with the pests. The blueberry farm has become “a surveillance site” for a type of fruit fly that came from the Orient via California and has invaded crops here.

“My office looks like I’m having a Tupperware party,” said Dapsis of all the food containers that hold various stages of the lives of the insects that are ravaging Spear’s blueberries. “Basically, we’re in hand-to-hand combat.”

In Harwich, the transfer station and the Family Pantry offered ideas of how to keep materials moving. The station recycles organic cuttings and welcomes Harwich gardeners to claim compost made from it.

The site offers a whole Dumpster devoted to “junk mail” and another where people with handicaps can recycle conveniently from their cars. Mike Kiernan, station manager, and Mike Maguire and David Quinn from the county offered a statistic: based on a study in which researchers actually ripped open trash bags and analyzed their contents, about 60 percent is textiles, meaning clothes, shoes, stuffed animals, and other everyday products.

Maguire said, “You can repurpose stuff like that other than to pay to have it taken away.” He said that the county is capturing less than 10 percent of textiles from the waste stream.

At the Family Food Pantry in Harwich, there’s a photo of the late Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, who loved the charity. Under his picture sits a bowl of fresh zucchini salad made by county extension nutritionists. The zucchini is cut in ribbons like noodles, except that there is no boiling water because the vegetable stays raw. The kitchen stays cool and the salad is delicious.

After lunch there is one more stop: the upweller in Chatham’s Stage Harbor.

Chatham is one of the bigger shellfish propagators on the Cape. Renee Gagne, the town’s shellfish constable, said that commercial permits, with a voluntary increase in the fees, “sustain the industry” – except with help from the county, she said.

Much more information is available at capecodextention.org or at 508-362-6690.

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